In Place of the Forest: Environmental and Socio-economic Transformation in Borneo and the Eastern Malay Peninsula (UNU, 1990, 310 pages)

Part 2 : Issues of endangerment and criticality

The forest people: Endangerment or criticality?

The issues

Deconstructing shifting cultivation

Different ways of farming the forests

Forest dwellers under forces of change

Land and forest at risk?

The future

Criticality, or crisis of adaptation?

Land and forest at risk?

The critics of shifting cultivators

Since the advent of the timber industry, the long-standing criticism of
shifting cultivation as a system has taken on a new dimension and, at the very
time that its defenders have become numerous, the criticisms have reached new
levels of hostility. There are three main prongs to the complaint. Shifting
cultivators are, by wide agreement, poor. On the basis of an income definition,
discussed in more detail in chapter 10, a 1989 survey showed 34 per cent of the
population of Sabah and 21 per cent of that of Sarawak as poor (Government of
Malaysia, 1991a). Most poor households are rural in both states. With the stated
aim of reducing poverty, the government of Sarawak has sought for over 20 years
to resettle shifting cultivators in managed cash-crop blocks. King (1988)
reports his own estimate that 40 per cent of Sarawak's population live below the
poverty line, overwhelmingly in rural areas. In South Kalimantan the poorest
people, in terms of the income available from all sources, seem to be in the
most crowded rural areas and the tidal swamps. These people are not shifting
cultivators, but then there are not many shifting cultivators in that small
province. It is certain that there are many poor people in the rural areas of
the other three provinces of Kalimantan who are indeed shifting cultivators.
Their income is likely to vary greatly from year to year depending on the
availability and price of other sources, such as particular forest products or
small-scale mining.

Allied to the question of poverty is the complaint that shifting cultivation
offers only low and uncertain productivity. The argument is an old one, but is
supported by the nutritional studies of A. J. U. Anderson (1978, 1980). These
suggested that only a few months'self sufficiency is provided by swiddengrown
rice. We briefly examined some evidence above, and Chin (1985), Lian (1987), and
Cramb (1989a, 1993) all question the alleged lack of selfsufficiency in basic
foods, more so when cultivated foods supplementary to rice are taken into
account. A considerable amount of food is also obtained from the fallow.

Burning down the forest?

The foresters' argument is that shifting cultivation annually consumes large
areas of primary forest, which could better be used to earn export income. The
locus classicus is a paper by Lau (1979: 419), in which it is stated that, for
every tree profitably logged, another "goes up in smoke." This view
has become orthodoxy, but critics have argued that Lau's estimate was based on
erroneous data concerning the area under shifting cultivation at any one time.
They have shown that in specific cases only quite small areas of primary forest
are used, most swiddens being made in secondary growth of from 7 to 20 years
(Hong, 1987; Lian, 1987; Sather, 1990). Cramb (1990) has produced data
purporting to show that shifting cultivators annually increase the area cut by
only 0.2 per cent, about as much as is logged each week. In a fairly lightly
peopled area of southern West Kalimantan, however, Helliwell (1990: 53-54)
clearly implies that a significant proportion of clearings are made each year in
primary rather than secondary forest, and the labour requirements and timing are
distinctively different in these gardens. The debate continues, and the evidence
remains equivocal. No resolution is in sight.

Creation of grasslands and "critical lands"

The most crucial argument, however, is that the system is extremely
destructive of natural resources as a whole. This view has an extensive
literature, spearheaded in Sarawak by Freeman (1955), and challenged by a number
of writers including Padoch (1982a, 1982b), Chin (1985), Lian (1987), Cramb
(1989b), Sather (1990), and others. Much seems to depend on the area described
by particular writers for, as we saw above, there is great variation in the
resilience of the soils and forest under interference. There are, however,
grasslands created by shifting cultivation, and there still is destruction. In
describing what seems to be an extreme case, the authors of one RePPProT study
in West Kalimantan warn that:

Pioneering shifting cultivation penetrates far into the ... forest areas and
threatens to fragment and consume all remaining non-swampland lowland forests in
the short to medium term. (RePPProT, 1987b, I: 30)

In Kalimantan, watersheds in which soil erosion has become severe are
designated "critical land" (Tanah Kritis). A recent estimate by the
Worldwide Fund for Nature of 20 million ha of such land for the whole of
Indonesia has been reduced to 13 million by reforestation and rehabilitation
work carried out, mainly in Java, by the Ministry of Forestry (MOF/FAO, 1991).
These new studies resulted in an upward revision of critical lands in Kalimantan
to almost 3 million ha, or 23 per cent of the total area - two-thirds of these
lands being in West and Central Kalimantan (Statistik Indonesia, 1990). Later
revisions have halved the area, making the whole exercise somewhat less than
credible. In West Kalimantan the main problem area is said to lie in the hilly
districts north of the Kapuas River. The RePPProT report describes "large
areas of barren land" in this region. A further statement is more explicit:

Very steep ridge systems of the Western Plains and Mountains and the Middle
Kapuas Basin have been degraded to grassland and scrub by overintensive shifting
cultivation. The erosion of these areas is excessive. Present reforestation
activities should concentrate on these areas first. (RePPProT, 1987b: 38)

The southern part of this zone is quite closely peopled, though it does
contain some extensive stretches of Imperata grassland. The northern part is
less wellpopulated and was, for decades or more, subject to raids by Iban and
related people from the north. Grassland and forest intermingle. It is of
interest to note that the areas with the widest extent of grassland in West
Kalimantan are not the areas mentioned above, although there are indeed patches
of alangalang (Imperata) occurring there (see chap. 9). In the western part is
an area in which some of the pressure might have come from Chinese cultivators
moving inland from the Sambas gold fields in the nineteenth century; a
considerable number settled in the northern lower Kapuas valley. There are also
degraded areas in western and central Sarawak, often on soils of poor quality,
which may apply to parts of West Kalimantan. Recommendations regarding
reforestation of degraded grasslands are also made for steep ridge systems in
the Meratus mountain foothills of south-east Kalimantan, which are also said to
be eroding excessively as a result of shifting cultivation (RePPProT, 1987a:
15). These latter areas are further discussed in chapter 9.

Toward an assessment

In approaching an assessment of the contribution of shifting cultivators to
environmental degradation we need to recall the historical material discussed in
chapter 2. There is strong presumptive evidence that, between one and three
centuries ago, and perhaps earlier, there were many more people in parts of
inland Borneo than there are today. Conversely, some present areas carry higher
populations than in historical times. Some coastal areas too, especially in
Sabah, became depopulated owing to the depredations of pirates. Although some
inland areas of Imperata grassland, of which there are a number in parts of
Borneo, may owe their origins to heavy cultivation in this earlier period, the
evidence of higher population in the past also relates to areas that are now
forest. These latter areas, or such of them as have not been logged, are now
clothed in what looks superficially like primary forest, but in fact differs
considerably in timber content from place to place. Many of the 104 concessions
in East Kalimantan let between 1967 and 1984 were found to contain areas bare of
the high-quality old-growth woods that were the principal merchantable species
until lately (Brookfield et al., 1990: 502). This might, as suggested in chapter
1, be due to ecological differences, or even to the consequences of past fires,
but it might also bear relation to occupation history.

We also need to note that cultivation systems themselves differ from place to
place, and probably have done so from time to time. However, it does seem likely
that substantial areas worked over by shifting cultivators in the past returned
to mature forest once the pressure was relaxed for a sufficiently long period.
This consideration should temper some of the criticism of shifting cultivators,
and even dare one say - of loggers. None the less, assessment of the present
situation has to take account of increasing pressure, both from population
growth and, in significant areas, also from the demands of cashcropping.
Moreover, "new" shifting cultivators are now in the Borneo forests,
principally in East Kalimantan, paralleling in some measure what "new"
shifting cultivators growing cassava and gambier did in the western Peninsula in
the nineteenth century. There may, however, be fewer of these than the emphasis
placed on them in parts of the literature (e.g. Kartawinata and Vayda, 1984) has
led many writers to believe.

The question of the ecological consequences of shifting cultivation is
complex. The effects depend not only on the length of the fallow period and
hence on population pressure but also, and importantly, on soil, climate, and
slope. On poor soils only a meagre forest recovers, even over a long time. When
dry weather is prolonged, fire used to make swiddens close to the end of the dry
period can more readily escape into the forest, and especially into secondary
forest where it kills saplings. The convection created by fires leads them up
slopes, and they are fired to take advantage of this assistance. Once grassland
is created on hills, it can therefore persist and slowly extend by repeated
burning. Large clearings recover much less readily than small clearings, where
seed sources are close at hand. There is no doubt that such damage occurs. Its
scale, however, varies greatly, and the chances of recovery are much lower where
transformation is taking place over large areas. Among present changes, those
leading to large clearings for commercial crops, especially in areas liable to
drought, are the most likely to lead to degradation. On the other hand, trends
toward agro-forestry making productive use of the fallow are far more likely to
lead to improvement. Both trends are present in the region, and the future could
go either or both ways. Chapter 9 will take this discussion
further.